Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga

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The Mysterious Truth of Being Known to the Heart

There are a number of philosophical or religious traditions that do not accept the unity of all creation as a “given”. They see a separation between the Creator and the created, between God and creature, with an insuperable gulf between them. The traditional Yoga of knowledge tends to dismiss this stance as a lower and incomplete understanding, or as another form of bondage to the lower Nature and the outer creation. For the practitioner of the integral Yoga, however, it is incumbent that the truth that underlies even this apparently contradictory formulation of existence, as consisting of a duality, be ferreted out and understood.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “If in their grosser forms these religions aim only at the ignorant joys of the lower heavens, yet there is a far higher and profounder sense in which we may appreciate the cry of the devotee poet when in a homely and vigorous metaphor he claimed the right of the soul to enjoy for ever the ecstasy of its embrace of the Supreme. ‘I do not want to become sugar,’ he wrote, ‘I want to eat sugar.’ However strongly we found ourselves on the essential identity of the one Self in all, we need not regard that cry as the mere aspiration of a certain kind of spiritual sensuousness or the rejection by an attached and ignorant soul of the pure and high austerity of the supreme Truth. On the contrary, it aims in its positive part at a deep and mysterious truth of Being which no human language can utter, of which human reason can give no adequate account, to which the heart has the key and which no pride of the soul of knowledge insisting on its own pure austerity can abolish.”

When we accept the Unity of all existence, the integration of the Transcendent aspect, the Universal aspect and the Individual aspect of existence, we necessarily also accept the multiplicity of forms and relations that arise out of those forms as having a reality of their own, which cannot be simply denied. The integral Yoga holds these two apparently opposite Truths in an embrace that encompasses both without denying either one its right and its underlying rationale of existence.

Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Two: The Yoga of Integral Knowledge, Chapter 11, The Modes of the Self, pp. 360-361